The charts in the link are beautiful. http://io9.com/5911520/a-chart-that-reveals-how-science-fiction-futures-changed-over-time Jordan Peacock originally shared this post: A Chart that Reveals How Science Fiction Futures Changed Over Time io9 In the 1900s and the 1980s, there were huge spikes in near-future science fiction. What do these eras have in common? Both were times of rapid technological change. In the 1900s you begin to see the widespread use of telephones, cameras, automobiles (the Model T came out in 1908), motion pictures, and home electricity. In the 1980s, the personal computer transformed people’s lives. In general, the future got closer at the end of the twentieth century. You can see a gradual trend in this chart where after the 1940s, near-future SF grows in popularity. Again, this might reflect rapid technological change and the fact that SF entered mainstream popular culture. The future is getting farther away from us right now. One of the only far-future narratives of the 1990s was Futurama. Then suddenly, in the 2000s, we saw a spike in far-future stories, many of them about posthuman, postsingular futures. It’s possible that during periods of extreme uncertainty about the future, as the 00s were in the wake of massive economic upheavals and 9/11, creators and audiences turn their eyes to the far future as a balm. A Chart that Reveals How Science Fiction Futures Changed Over Time

Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature Despite our visions and desires for a more ecologically integrated kind of technology, the scientific paradigm, which underpins technological development, considers the world to be a machine. Ecologist Fern Wickson argues that humans are intertwined in a complex web of biological systems and cannot be included within a definition of nature where “an atom bomb becomes as ‘natural’ as an anthill” and wonders whether there is a better definition of nature [4]. Changing the definition of nature is not the solution to Wikson’s conundrum. The scientific method is actually responsible for this paradox. If the problem of human connectedness to the natural world is to be resolved, then science itself needs to change. Modern science relies on ‘natural laws’ that use mathematical proofs and the metaphor of machines to convey its universal truths. In the 1950s Robert Rosen observed that when physics is used to describe biology, a generalization occurs that distorts reality. Alan Turing noted in his essay on morphogenesis that mathematical abstraction couldn’t capture the richness of the natural world [6]. Life is a complex system that is governed by a variety of unique processes that machines simply do not possess. Life responds to its environment, constantly changes with time and is made up of functional components that enables life the ability to self-regulate [7]. Complexity challenges the epistemological basis on which modern science and industry are grounded. So what does complex science mean for our relationship with nature? Are we separate from or intrinsically connected to the natural world? In a complex system we are both. Our actions through technology are intrinsically governed by the physical and chemical constraints of the terrestrial environment, yet we also possess agency and a capacity to modify our surroundings. But if we are […]

Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from its garbage. +Bruce Sterling’s witty insight is elaborated brilliantly and hilariously by Slavoj Zizek in the clip below from the film Examined Life. This quote comes from IEEE’s article “Any Advanced Civilization is indistinguishable from nature” http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/5795 Slavoj Zizek in Examined Life

Depressed People Surf the Web Differently It turns out depressed persons spend a lot more time flipping around the Internet randomly, have less consistent usage times and use more file-sharing programs and (this one surprised me) sent out more e-mails. Researchers said the random Internet patterns (such as watching a video followed by an email to watching part of another video to reading part this article, etc.) could point toward trouble concentrating, a symptom of depression. Usage itself was erratic, too: some students would spend hours a day online then not touch the computer for two days. More info: http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20120517/9915/depression-internet-usage.htm Via: http://dvice.com/archives/2012/05/depression-lead.php

The Zombie Within by Alva Noë Yes, athletes, musicians, drivers and chess players, when they are in the flow, can act fast without needing to make decisions about what to do. But this is not because they aren’t thinking. Nor is it because they are thinking really fast. It’s because they are thinking about what matters, such as the musical ideas or the traffic or the potential vulnerability of the King to attack. Mastery consists precisely in shifting attention from the mechanics of a task to, if you like, the task’s point. Nothing illustrates this better than the case of language itself. We learn to decline and conjugate so that we can talk. The learner of a second language needs to give painstaking attention to grammatical choices and rules. But conversation — thoughtful participation in the parry and thrust, the give and take — requires that we stop focusing on the grammar and start focusing on what we are doing. What is required is not that we become automata, or forget the grammar; what is required is that we become masters of it. More: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/05/18/153025680/the-zombie-within via Michelle Merritt

“Let children play, because it’s never just play.” #education is how we manage the #attentioneconomy . via +Paul Harper Google in Education originally shared this post: How do humans learn? Born to Learn is the first animation in a fascinating series aimed to provide easy-access to the exciting new discoveries constantly being made about how humans learn. It is part of +YouTube Edu. #youtubeedu Born to Learn

The Wisdom of Mold Despite its ability to solve an array of problems, the slime mold was designed by evolution to solve just one problem: how to build an optimal transport network (for its nutrients). So we decided to investigate how the slime mold, when presented with the task of connecting the major urban areas of the United States, would design a transport system. Would its design resemble that of the United States highway system, or would the slime mold propose a superior one? Here’s how our experiment worked. As we detail in a forthcoming article in the journal Complex Systems, we took a large dish in the shape of the United States and placed rolled oats (a food for the slime mold) in the locations of 20 major urban areas. Then we put the slime mold on the rolled oats representing the New York area. The slime mold propagated out from New York toward the other urban areas and eventually spanned them all with its network of protoplasmic tubes. We performed this experiment a number of times. What did the resulting network look like? It looked remarkably like the United States interstate highway system. We found that the slime mold approximated almost all interstates. Links from Dallas to Houston, from Chicago to Milwaukee and from New York to Boston were reproduced by the slime mold in almost all experiments. We also found that in three out of four experiments, the slime mold approximated the routes from the San Jose, Calif., area to Las Vegas; the chain of links connecting Denver to Albuquerque to the Phoenix area to the Los Angeles area; and the chain of links connecting Kansas City, Mo., to Oklahoma City to the Dallas area to the Houston area. It also approximated two chains — one connecting […]

What is surprising is that the activities within the segregated groups are rather unexpected based on the social-media activities of right- and left- leaning groups leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Back then, according to the article “the Obama campaign enjoyed twice as much web traffic, had four times as many YouTube viewers and five times more Facebook friends compared to the McCain campaign.” In 2010, the right-leaning crowd took the social-media lead, at least on Twitter. The team found that, compared to left-wingers, right-wingers are more likely to self-identify as such in their bios, spend more time talking about politics on Twitter and do so more often, as well as share more politically-related information in the form of hyperlinks. The right wing group is more tightly interconnected, has a larger network of politically-minded followers and has “a higher degree of engagement with the Twitter platform itself.” Finally, they used self-reported location data (as opposed to geolocation data) to determine where the groups are Tweeting from, geographically speaking. While there is some overlap between the Twitter map and political party maps, the team accounts for the discrepancy by saying that perhaps outliers in a politically homogenous community turn to Twitter for their discourse, which seems like a reasonable enough explanation to me. Bruno Gonçalves originally shared this post: InSolution » What does Twitter have to say about politics? Here’s another Twitter-analysis post for all you network science junkies out there. And although I’m a bit late to the table (New Scientist reported on this a week ago) I couldn’t resist. …

This is going around from several places on my stream, and it is definitely worth passing on. I wish he had said something at the end about using networks to model the growth of trees, which would tie back into the universal structure, Aristotlean framework that starts the whole piece off. Still, this is a wonderful introduction to the networked paradigm, and is important background to understanding the digital age. #complexity #organization #networks #digitalvalues Andrea Graziano originally shared this post: via +Amira notes

Experimental Philosophy The traditional, armchair model occupies the theoretical realm of pure abstract thought. To the traditional philosopher, real-world input is an unnecessary, unseemly distraction from the business at hand. Still, even a skeptic like Princeton philosophy professor Gideon Rosen acknowledges experimental philosophy’s appeal. “The rap against philosophy has always been that there’s no method or cumulative development of results,” Rosen says. “So it’s not surprising that something came along that looked like scientific method, and people paid attention.” In fact, empirical data has had a place in philosophy for centuries. In Experiments in Ethics, Appiah claims that experimental philosophy’s engagement with the larger world makes it “really more traditional” than what today is considered traditional philosophy. “You can do good work without an MRI, but it’s an interesting question of philosophical taste or method,” says Appiah. “How important is empirical knowledge to philosophy? I think the answer is ‘hugely’ and always has been.” Twentieth-century “analytic philosophy,” concerned largely with scientific matters, was championed by Harvard professor Willard Van Orman Quine — who summarized his view of the unity of philosophy and science with the famous quip, “Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.” One of Quine’s graduate students at Harvard was Harman, who came to Princeton’s philosophy department in 1963 and helped foster an atmosphere of openness to empirical data. Gilbert Harman originally shared this post: Experimental Philosophy http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2012/05/16/pages/1568/index.xml Princeton Alumni Weekly: Philosophy tests Imagine a particularly horrific wartime dilemma. You’re a doctor tending to people in the squalid Jewish ghetto of a Nazi-occupied town, where several of your patients have come down with typhoid …